


Violin Concerto

by FateTrash



Category: Given (Anime), Given (Manga)
Genre: Character Study, Extended Metaphors, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Manga Spoilers, Metaphors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-27
Updated: 2019-10-27
Packaged: 2021-01-04 11:40:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21197057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FateTrash/pseuds/FateTrash
Summary: Whenever Murata Ugetsu crosses his mind, his thoughts become suffocating.





	Violin Concerto

Ever since Sato Mafuyu joined their band, things were working out for them better than it had in the last two years. Because they lacked a vocalist, any and all of The Seasons gigs were instrumental. Akihiko was in no manner complaining about this fact. Uenoyama and Haruki both got to play the way they liked, and he was able to play the drums as a way to drown out the shrill of the violin. With a similar mindset, they all got along well.

Then came Mafuyu, a clear rain shower that disperses the dark skies, his voice carrying so much emotion that it was like a lightning strike upon those who listened. It was a familiar pain, the pain of life, the suffering of those who are alive, singing out with every sigh of the violin that he knew so well.

Akihiko’s thoughts inevitably travel back to him. The arch of his back, the shades of his eyes, the softness of his palm - the most fragile of instruments, but also the most powerful weapon that pierces through the drum’s surface until Akihiko can’t make another sound no matter how much he screams.

_“Let’s end this already, Aki.”_

Band practices were a method of escape. Dinner and drinks with everyone after, non-alcoholic for Uenoyama and Mafuyu. Time to time, he’d drink. Time to time, he’d have ridden his motorcycle and still drank. When that happens, he would find somewhere to stay. It could be anywhere. Hotels. People he knew. People he didn’t know. Lately, lately, because these were band activities, he had began to rely on Haruki.

Haruki was dependable, responsible, and Akihiko found himself looking to him to depend on. He asked him to stay over, and once the alcohol passes, he doesn’t stay, and he leaves. There was no need to intrude for longer than necessary, he thought. And part of him searched for the dark eyes that would peer out at him from under the bed covers.

“I already reminded you that you drove tonight! And still you drank. You can stay over tonight, again, if you want,” Haruki’s voice sounded clearly, carefully, and he feels his arm help him stand upright.

“I’m good,” Akihiko heard himself say, righting himself. “I’m going to catch a cab home.”

“Eh?” There was surprise in Haruki’s voice. Akihiko doesn’t blame him. Rarely does he go home when he’s drunk. There were always temptations at home, fragile things he couldn’t let his fist grab onto when he’s drunk. But tonight was different.

_He_ wasn’t home.

Akihiko never expected people to understand. He wouldn’t. He didn’t care what people thought of him, whether he was sleeping around, or relying on people around him too much. If it meant he didn’t have to go home drunk, go home, and have to see him clothed in someone else’s clothes, play their game of push and pull, he didn’t want to lash out. Whether that be at the third party that his landlord invited into their bed, or his landlord himself.

Ugetsu Murata.

Landlord. Ex. A friend with benefits. A genius. The world famous violinist. A slob. Incapable of keeping his house or his hair tidy. He was so many things.

He was everything to Akihiko.

At the same time, he wanted to wrap his arms around his throat and squeeze every sound he could wrangle from him. He wanted to wreck him. Akihiko wanted him to feel exactly how his existence had brought ruin to his life. He wanted his fingers to play the genius violinist.

“Are you really going to be okay?” Haruki sees him to the taxi, outside of the train station.

Akihiko flashes him a smile. “Yeah. Night, Haruki.”

The taxi door closes.

——

The dim street lights wash against the taxi window, illuminating his tired features, then the light faded away. The repetition occurs until he’s come to a familiar place. His set of keys were pulled out and the cab fare was paid for.

He was tired. Akihiko has to admit he was surprised by the rate Mafuyu had improved. The genius-types were definitely all odd and difficult to grasp. Taking off his shoes neatly, Akihiko lowers his bag down to his side, and leaves it by the drumset that was set up in the room. His mind was a violin concerto, the song reaching a crescendo as it pulled his hands to turn on the tap. Akihiko takes a small sip of water, his mind not focusing on anything, unable to focus on anything. It was a source of relief.

He drags his feet towards the bathroom, and his hand reaches for the light switch.

“You’re home really late, Aki.”

The quiet voice was as loud as cymbals crashing together, shattering his dream-like state. As in present in a horror movie, he slowly turned to face his demon. “_Uge—_“ Shouldn’t he be overseas? Didn’t he pack his bags this morning? He even said someone was coming to pick him up.

Akihiko’s ability to be himself, carelessly, aimlessly moving through ‘home’ that he knew so well was entirely yanked from him the second the presence in the basement made itself known. The lights in the bathroom don’t turn on, his hand no longer working towards the light switch. His heartbeat was a steady rhythm, fast, in his ears.

Ugetsu doesn’t sit up. He hadn’t heard the sound of the door unlock, but he had heard the careless noise of items hitting the floor, of feet scraping against the ground. In this soundproof basement, not a sound escapes. But it also kept a lot of sound out, a protective dome for the people who lived here, for the ones who lived with music as sustenance. He hears the start of his name, and his eyes open blearily to find the figure in the dark.

Their eyes met in the unforgiving darkness like a peaceful wave of violin against the rambunctious tantrum of the drums, neither backing down, neither willing to compromise even as the chords cut into old and fresh wounds alike, until they both stood in a puddle of their own notes on the ground, blended and mixed together for an awful orchestra number.

It takes Akihiko another few seconds for his eyes to adjust, even if he didn’t need to see to know where things were. He couldn’t hear himself think, nor of the rhythmic beat of the drum as the warmth of the alcohol, the eyes that were fixed on him scorched at places within him he couldn’t reach and put out. Instead of finishing what he had started to say, the rest came out in a shaky breath.

“You were probably with your band again, right?” The crumpled covers on the bed reveal a leg, the pajama pants rolled up. An arm slides out from under the similarly dark bedsheets, finding his phone and tapping at the screen to see what time it was. It was late. But it wasn’t *that* late yet. “Come to bed, Aki.” The phone was discarded back on the table surface once its function was fulfilled.

Like the phone that falls with a clatter, the sounds of legs that hit against each other rougher than they should sound, before the person that it carries with them lands soundly onto the ground.

“...Aki, are you drun--”  
“Hah… I definitely misheard that… definitely… fuck.”

After a moment of silence, both of them had spoken up at the same time. Ugetsu stops, while Akihiko pulled his hands up to his face, muffing the rest of what he was saying after the expletive. Ugetsu tries to recall the last time that he had seen Akihiko drunk. It wasn’t just the fact that he had woken from his slumber that he couldn’t remember, but… he genuinely couldn’t remember. It had to be at least ...two years now.

There was a reason why Akihiko always stayed over somewhere else if he was drunk and Ugetsu was home. His head pounded like ghost notes on the sheet music, and his hands curl into his short hair. His fists could easily curl up and pound to the beat of neutral clefs on the sheet music if something was to set him off. If he was to see someone unwanted in *his home*. Akihiko would gladly and uninhibitedly throw them out, let their head hit every step of the steps up on the way out without a modicum of sympathy.

_But the thought of cornering and breaking the precious violin situated in the basement was a nightmare that dug into his core like a record being tortured with sharp, hot nails._

By now, Ugetsu had determined that Akihiko was indeed drunk. There was little rhyme or reason otherwise to why he was muttering to himself with his face in his hands. His feet touch the cool basement floor. With a sigh, Ugetsu opens his mouth to complain, but spares the man on the ground another glance and closes his mouth with a sigh instead. Rubbing at the back of his head, he steps forward, oblivious to the hurried string of sixteenth notes that pounded at Akihiko’s chest in between every half note of his footsteps.

“Come on, Aki, get to bed. I’ll be nice and even get you some water if you listen to me, okay?” Ugetsu extends a hand forward, bending forward delicately, his other hand resting on his knee.

“Be a good boy and do as I say,” as if coaxing a child, his voice was as gentle Akihiko remembered it was that one spring day, when the same voice described him as ‘delicate’. His fight or flight instincts had kicked off insanely fast, and the last thing he wanted to do was fight. But the voice, the hand that stretched out to him also closed off any possible escape routes. Akihiko lowered his hands from his face. The offer for water was ignored as rough hands seize and capture the man causing him so much despair, so much heartache, into his chest, against him. For someone like that, Akihiko held him tightly, wishing to strangle the life out of him, wanting to leave his mark on every surface of his skin, stretching their strings so thin, watching it majestically gasp out a solo just for him.

Unlike a violin concerto, the clumsy limbs that tangle, the bodies that crash into each other were not exactly a pleasant noise. But now, the two sat on the ground, one on top of the other, the one situated on grumbling out his complaints. “That _hurts_, Akihiko,” but whether it was from the tight grip on him, how his legs had hit the floor, or the suffocating feeling in his chest, Ugetsu didn’t elaborate.

“Stay. ...Stay like this with me, for a while,” delicate. Soft. Passionate. Like a fire that was ever burning, was Akihiko. It was a flame so strong that it burns the tips of Ugetsu’s fingers whenever he lets himself hold on for too long. But still, Ugetsu held on, unable to deny the fingertips that dug into his sides, the molten heat that whispered his name when he had let Akihiko take his silence as his answer.

The frame that Akihiko held onto felt so much smaller than his own, made and clothed in fabric and worth he shouldn’t have been able to touch. Yet, here they sat, two halves of a whole that knew how to cause each other just as much suffering as happiness.

Suffocating. Every thought that entered his mind and multiplied was suffocating. There was no end to the analogies and things he could compare this to.

Together, they sat in silence.

The rest note was foreign, it was too long.

Half an hour swims by, and Akihiko’s lips find his way to Ugetsu’s neck, drawing a quiet ‘Aki…?’ from the instrument in his arms. His hands move from Ugetsu’s sides, and underneath his clothes. Akihiko’s fingertips dip with a light pressure, and they draw down his sides, pulling a shrill gasp from the violin.

Laying him down on the floor, he captures his lips with his own, the gentleness from earlier fading into an impassioned start of the song, expertly pressing his fingertips down against the warm skin, and playing a song that doesn’t escape the soundproof room.


End file.
